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Top Comments: A Holiday Decoration Dilemma [1]

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Date: 2022-12-08

Flamingos, HO scale hobos, O scale people (matching the scale of the train), and zombies.

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Last year, for Christmas, I revived my grandfather’s 80-year-old Lionel train set, which had not been in operation for the previous 40 years. This constitutes the most I’ve done along the lines of holiday decoration since I left home for graduate school more than 40 years ago. Back 40 years ago, it was my father who would set up the Lionel train, but he died before he had the chance to show me how to do it. So I had to figure out how to do it on my own (with a lot of help from a local model train shop called Frank the Train Man). Here is the result:

x YouTube Video

Everyone who saw the set-up, including hubby’s family, were impressed. Indeed, my sister in law (wife to hubby’s brother) was so impressed, she started buying stuff for the platform. First, when she learned there was a trailer park, she bought a package of 100 pink flamingos (slightly large for the train scale, but just within the realm of believability). Given that I only had 3 trailers on the platform, 100 pink flamingos was something like overkill, but it occurred to me that when I set up the platform next, I could create a tableau of two overlapping worlds—one where humans are in control, and one where the flamingos are in control—but never actually see each other.

However, my sister-in-law was only getting started. For my birthday, she gave me two more packages destined for the train platform. I had mentioned to her, at some point, that there was a hobo jungle that could be obtained for the platform, so she sought out hobo figures for train platform decoration… except she got them at HO scale, which is much smaller than the O scale of the Lionel train and all the other figures. Next to the O scale figures, the hobos look like Hobbits. She also gave me a canister of zombie figures which are significantly larger than the O scale figures. Samples of the full panoply of figures are shown in the title figure.

My problem: How do I incorporate all of these figures into a single train platform? No matter what I do, it’s going to look, shall we say, busy. One thing that I will not do is create a post-apocalyptic landscape. I can’t afford to creatively destroy the buildings I bought last year in the interests of making a realistic hellscape. Also, it is not practical for me to expand the platform, partly because we lack the space, and partly because my woodworking skills are essentially nonexistent. (My father and grandfather were the ones with those skills.)

I suppose I should just relax and have fun with it, but if you have any creative suggestions on how these figures could all be brought together in a semi-coherent manner, I’d love to hear them.

Comments are below the fold.

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